The final score

If it was a match, with one team representing football and the other proudly donning their soccer kits, it would have been a nail-bitter of a game.
The final score — Team Soccer: 53. Team Football: 47.
That was the result of a recent online and in-person poll conducted by NorthStar Bets, a made-in-Ontario casino and sportsbook gaming platform, when it asked respondents how they refer to the beautiful game.
“What we have found is that it is truly a divided market,” said Dante Anderson, vice-president of marketing for NorthStar Bets. “The vote was so close for so long throughout the campaign. But, in the end, soccer edged out.”
Started in time for June’s UEFA Euro 2024 tournament and the Copa América championship, the poll was a chance for fans of the sport to weigh-in on this age-old battle, one mostly based on world geography. While football rules in most of the world, the term soccer is used in several countries, including Canada, the United States, Australia and parts of South Africa.
“The seed for this whole campaign was that we recognize that Ontario is really diverse when it comes to fans for the beautiful game — or soccer or whatever you want to call it,” said Anderson. “There are first-generation, second-generation, third-generation people, and it is very multicultural.
“We wanted to tap into that culture about the sport, because it is alive and well in Ontario, and in Toronto even more so. The sport also doesn’t get the profile it deserves. It is overshadowed by hockey, basketball and baseball, so we felt there was an opportunity to tap into the energy and excitement of the World Cup and Copa and provoke a bit of a debate and get the fans fired up.”
He said the online poll responses they received tended to lean a bit more toward soccer, while the in-person results favoured football. He said those responses were gathered during the tournaments in Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood
“There was so much passion,” he said about that in-person experience. “We talked to a couple hundred people, and we have some of those on video, and it was either you were on one side or another, and 99 per cent of the time you were really passionate about it.”
“The thing that surprised me the most was the literal viewpoint on the name that we heard. That it is football because you play it with your feet. I never thought about it that way in my up bringing or even when I refer to it as football.”
One of those passionate football preferring voices came from Stefan McGuinness, NorthStar Bet’s Irish-born head of operations.
“I always say, ‘You kick the ball. It is foot and ball. It’s in the name.’ American football you are throwing something that isn’t even a ball. It’s egg-shaped. That isn’t football, that is ‘hand egg.’ Call football ‘football’ — it is what you do with it — and call American football something else,” he said at the start of the campaign.
“There was an intensity to Stefan that came through his word that I had never seen before, and that was consistent with what we heard on the street, too,” said Anderson. “The other thing was that I learned something about the history of the game and why it evolved into soccer.”
That story starts in 12th century England, when a violent and rough form of the game was played by rival villages or communities in fields and roads. Not surprisingly, FootballHistory.org said, the game was banned for centuries in several parts of Europe because of its associated violence. That was until a more orderly and organized form of the game was developed by some English schools about 200 years ago.
According to the editors at Encyclopaedia Britannica, this is where the roots of this name debate date from. In the second half of the 1800s, England formed the Football Association to write rules to differentiate a non-hands version of the game from the equally popular rugby football.
Eventually association football, referred to as such because its rules where set by the Football Association, was shortened to assoccer and then soccer. As rugby football started being referred to as rugby, association football took over the mantle of football. Many English colonies ended up using soccer, as it was the more common usage at the time.
“I would be lying if I said I would be a convert because of this campaign and start calling it football, because I grew up calling it soccer,” Anderson said.
He said “soccer” is also on the tongue in Canada because it is in the name of Soccer Canada, and in the name of our men and women’s national team. It’s even in the name of Major League Soccer, with teams across North America. The only visible outlier is the Toronto Football Club.
“If you think about someone who was born here, in school you join the soccer team, not the football team. It’s in your DNA and lingo. If you were born somewhere else, it is a different story. But even when they say football, they sometimes need to say soccer to clarify what they are talking about.”
Anderson said it will get interesting in a couple years when Canada hosts the 2026 FIFA World Cup along with the U.S. and Mexico. Will football suddenly take over from soccer as the world descends on Toronto, one of the cities hosting matches.
“Soccer is what is natural to me. But you have to acknowledge that this is a global sport and it really should be called football,” Anderson said. “Because there are going to be events here on the ground, I think this debate is going to be relevant for a long, long time.”
While the soccer versus football poll is now closed, be sure to also visit Northstarbets.ca and Northstarbets.com for all your latest soccer news and insights.